HOSTCOMM NEWS

​Can You Afford Not to Switch to Hosted Telephony?

The technology landscape is always changing – often faster than business budgets are growing. But while outdated ways of working may offer familiarity and predictability, the financial impact on your business could be huge.

On the surface, the cost implication of moving from an in-house PBX to hosted telephony seems to be switching from a primarily capital expense to OPEX. In practice, though, making the change could have a far bigger impact, while sticking with on-premise telephony could be costing you thousands of pounds every year.

Read on to learn about the varied costs associated with your in-house telephony – and how hosted VoIP could save you money while dramatically improving the way you work.

What your in-house telephony costs

If you’re not currently running your own telephony, it can be hard to get a firm grip on the associated costs. There’s a great deal of variance in supplier pricing for everything from servers to desk phones, not to mention widely differing features.

However, one thing is for sure – it takes numerous different things to keep your on-premise telephony operational. Each of those things is another cost for you to burden.

It starts with the PBX appliance itself, which can range from as little as £500 to five-figures depending on a range of criteria including:

How many users you need (both overall and simultaneously)

The features you require (from voicemail to find me / follow me and so on)

The biggest cost, though, is often expertise. Getting your telephony up-and-running requires expertise you’re unlikely to keep in-house and on your payroll, meaning an installation cost of anywhere from £2000-£6000. That’s before the ongoing cost of management and maintenance to keep you connected at all times – a significant expense in the climate of a widespread IT skills shortage.

Choosing or continuing to use an on-premise solution keeps you tied to ever-depreciating hardware and paying for increasingly costly maintenance. All while missing out on new features as they become available in newer hardware.

The price of missed opportunities and lost business

While the fixed costs of telephony implementation and the ongoing costs of maintenance and management are relatively easy to estimate, the limitations of an in-house solution come with a far less tangible cost.

In the most severe cases, outdated telephony could leave you severely limited on functionality. Essentials of modern business like sophisticated call routing and voicemail could be impossible or prohibitively time-consuming to use. If your people are hard to reach when they leave the office, or unreliable technology is an obstacle to good service, lost business has a very real effect on your bottom line.

Moreover, if you outgrow the telephony infrastructure you have invested in, there’s little to do except write off the cost and re-invest capital in hardware that can support your growing number of users and lines.

Hosted VoIP saves money by bringing flexibility to your telephony, not just the way you route calls day-to-day, but also the ability to grow endlessly and scale to meet demand at a moments’ notice. So you can turn all your telephony costs into a single monthly fee including maintenance – and get a return on investment that on-premise hardware simply can’t offer.